Ma Bufang

Ma Bufang (1903-1975) was a Muslim Hui Chinese warlord who belonged to the Xibei San Ma dynasty, serving as Governor of Qinghai from 5 March 1938 to September 1949 (succeeding Ma Lin and preceding Zhao Shoushan). While he was known for being a great Muslim general of the Republic of China, he rejected the notion of an independent East Turkestan, maintaining that Xinjiang was a part of China.

Biography
Ma Bufang was born in 1903 in Gansu, the younger brother of Ma Buqing. Their father Ma Qi was the founder of the Muslim Ninghai Army of Qinghai in 1915 in the aftermath of the Xinhai Revolution, and Ma Bufang supported fellow warlord Feng Yuxiang until he was convinced to side with Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang after the Northern Expedition. In 1936, he helped in the defeat of the communist general Zhang Guotao, and he was rewarded with the governorship of Qinghai. Ma, a fierce anti-communist, also hated Tibet, and he launched several campaigns to exterminate the Goloks and to destroy Tibetan Buddhist monasteries after a 1932 war with the 13th Dalai Lama began the rivalry. In 1937 and 1938, Ma Bufang ignored Japan's attempts to recruit him as an ally against the Republic of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and he fought against both Tibet and Japan during the late 1930s and early 1940s. He sent his relative Ma Biao to battle the Imperial Japanese Army in Henan province, later sending his relative Ma Bukang to replace Ma Biao in the summer of 1942.

In 1945, Bufang was appointed to the central committee of the Kuomintang party, and he fought against revolting Uyghurs in addition to fighting the Communist Party of China during the Chinese Civil War. Joseph Stalin sent forty airplanes to battle his forces, who controlled territory thirteen times as big as Texas and the 14,000,000 people inside of it (one-third Han Chinese, one-third Hui, and one-third Mongols, Tibetans, Turks, Mongols, and Kazakhs). In 1950, he fled to Cairo, Egypt after the communist takeover of China, but he encouraged an Islamic insurgency from 1950 to 1958. He requested the help of Arab countries in the Kuomintang struggle, and he opposed the notions of an independent East Turkestan, arguing that Xinjiang was a part of China. He died in Saudi Arabia in 1975 at the age of 72.